The Ethical Issues of Analyzing Time, Desire, and Self-Control

My tentative dissertation project (becoming less tentative as my defense date draws closer) has to do with time, desire, and self-control. One basic premise of the project is that each of us has short-term desires and long-term desires, and that these desires are often in conflict with one another. We might say that "part of us" wants to eat that chocolate cake or spend time on our favorite leisure website, and another "part of us" wants to eat less fat and carbs and spend more time working on projects, exercising, or volunteering. This, in and of itself, doesn't seem that controversial.

Through parents/caregivers and the education system, most people learn at an early age the consequences of too-frequently indulging their short-term desires. The more immediate, painful, and affective the negative consequence, the easier it is to convince yourself to refrain from future indulgence. Even before our parents/caregivers, evolution gave us in-born, visceral reactions to things that are good for us in the long run (eating nutritious berries = yummy!) and things that are bad for us in the long run (eating poisonous berries = vomit). But evolution doesn't provide the fine tuning, and in a fast-changing, complex environment, our consequence estimations need outside assistance. A different kind of convincing-of-the-short-term-self needs to happen when the feedback isn't visceral and immediate.

People have been smoking tobacco for roughly 5000-7000 years, but it wasn't until the last hundred years that large numbers of people knew that it hastened their death. Of course, most ancient smokers died from other ailments when the lifespan wasn't long enough for them to die of lung cancer. Once it became long enough, and once scientists had found a connection between smoking and cancer, a large number of people who would've enjoyed smoking in the short-term stopped or cut down (or at least felt guilty) because they had been informed by some trusted "other" that doing so would bring about long-term benefits. This isn't just self-control. Its informed self-control.

In some ways, this is the role of culture in general: to produce informed self-control (Freud's super-ego). We've all got the easy behavioral imperatives figured out: don't eat stuff that makes you puke; avoid situations that evoke terror. Rules exist because some of us (or all of us under some circumstances) may be inclined to behave in ways that are prohibited by those rules. Rules are not so much "made to be broken" as made to correct what was "broken" about our perceptions of consequences. For better or worse, this has become the domain of doctors: first physicians and perhaps now psychologists and psychiatrists. They make rules based on observations of seemingly disconnected actions and consequences. They are experts in consequences. Did psychologists, educators, or scientists aspire to the role of rule-maker? Probably not, but they're a necessary bi-product of a complex world in which our finite senses can't keep track of the many connections between actions and consequences. To believe otherwise is to succumb to nostalgia for a by-gone world.

Things get messy when we get personal about our analysis of time, desire, and self-control: media use (my area of research) and, even more personal, marriage and sex. There have been some terrific articles and commentary about marriage and fidelity in the wake of Anthony Weiner's virtual infidelity and NY's passing of a gay marriage law. A defining characteristic of marriage is the pledge of individuals to stick together. Its an attempt of the long-term-thinking self to override the future short-term-thinking selves so that the long-term self can benefit. But who is informing that long-term-thinking self? What is their evidence? What is their agenda?

This leaves us with an uncomfortable reality: those who can demonstrate the negative long-term consequences of things you know are pleasurable in the short-term and you think are not harmful in the long-term are telling you what to do, and people tend to not like being told what to do. For good reasons, too. Those in positions of power abuse it for their own gain. If I own stock in a cookie company, I'll fund research and coverage of research suggesting that another indulgence is particularly harmful, leading people away from that indulgence and toward cookies. Similarly, certain relationship experts might promote a certain view of monogamy because they benefit from its success in the marketplace of ideas, not because its any more accurate at predicting negative consequences than any other theory. The same might be said of a media effects researcher. Those who reject the findings of so-called experts analyzing this complex causal world can simply blame another aspect of that complex world that isn't under their control, freeing their short-term selves from blame. If people who aren't in long-term, monogamous relationships aren't happy, its not because they couldn't exert the self-control recommended by experts; its because they're being judged by an unfair, retrograde society intent on maintaining a certain kind of social order. If people who play lots of violent video games are more aggressive, then its because you measured "aggression" wrong or its due to some variable the researchers didn't control for. Basically, this leaves everybody believing what they want to believe, deferring to no one, and assessing consequences based on personal experience and the limited experience of those around them.

Since I don't want this entry (or anything else I write) to be an empty exercise in hand-wringing, I'll suggest some priorities for research and reporting on research.

We'll have to move from a proscription paradigm to an explanation paradigm, one that is supported by replicable empirical evidence. It is best to demonstrate how to find the links between short-term behavior and long-term consequences, to let people "see for themselves" as much as you can. Our society has become more complex, making it difficult to see the connections. Much of the study of the world, in science and the humanities, has become equally complex: full of impenetrable jargon and statistics. We've got to make explanations clearer, better educate ourselves so that we have some basic fluency in these languages, and support an education system that helps students understand how to find connections for themselves. Yes, we live in an extremely complex world, but the good news is that we've just scratched the surface of how technology can be used to explain concepts, patterns, and connections to large numbers of people in a customizable, individualized way, for free. Behavioral scientists and theorists might be at the forefront of finding patterns in behavior across time, but they can't maintain the trust of the public unless the public can see for themselves.

Not only can the public see for themselves, but maybe they can do the restricting themselves, too. We've all got a conscience. We just don't have the societal restrictions to assist it, and physically/temporally proximate temptation makes it harder to listen to that voice. We're not all tempted by the same thing, so the restrictions really shouldn't be one size fits all. If people can design their own restrictions, you avoid the possibilities of reactance and the totalitarian manipulation of taste that inspires it.

So, I'd like to run an outside-the-lab experiment to provide evidence that supports my dissertation hypothesis, but I'd also like people to be able to try the experiment on themselves, to plug in their own individual variables.